Kingsley Ayogu
Ijeoma (All that is gold does not glitter), 2025
Oil on canvas
40 x 43 cm (15.75 x 16.93 in)
*Prices are exclusive of shipping costs Ijeoma (All that is gold does not glitter)In Ijeoma (All that is gold does not glitter), Kingsley Ayogu renders a portrait that resists both literal time and fixed identity. The figure emerges from a lush, velvety green background—an ambiguous terrain that feels neither wholly earthly nor cosmic. Her gaze is unwavering, intimate yet unyielding, as if she knows more than what the surface reveals. Her body is interwoven with symbolic marks and glyphs that seem to hover between tattoo and constellation, mapping a psychic territory inherited through generations.A bouquet of drooping flowers—delicate, almost mournful—extends from her torso, not held but rooted in her, like offerings from an internal altar. These flowers, suspended in varying states of bloom and decay, gesture to cycles of time and transformation. Their presence is less botanical than metaphorical: a symbol of ephemeral beauty, of histories that cannot be preserved but only lived through. The choice of flowers in this portrait suggests the passing of unseen rituals—withered inheritances, soft revolts, ancestral silences.Ayogu draws on Carl Jung’s theory of collective consciousness to suggest that Ijeoma is not a singular subject, but a vessel of archetypes—a medium for dreams passed down through bloodlines. Her presence recalls postmemory, that haunting legacy where inherited trauma and recollections shape present identity even in the absence of direct experience. She does not simply carry flowers; she carries time. She is a bloom grown in the shadow of another’s grief, an afterimage of someone else’s choices.The composition resists completion. The raw edge of the canvas, unframed and fraying, extends the metaphor: Ijeoma is in process, unfinished, porous to the world around her. There’s a refusal of perfection, an embrace of the in-between. Against the saturated green—a color rich with life force, fertility, and otherworldly resonance—her form flickers between visibility and erasure. Ayogu allows the spiritual to leak into the material, proposing that identity is not only shaped by the now, but by echoes—by all the things that glittered once, whether gold or not.In this portrait, glitter is not a promise of wealth or fame but of value unrecognized by the visible world. Ayogu invites us to look differently—to read the symbols in skin, the stories in silence, the constellations blooming beneath the surface. Ijeoma stands not just as a person, but as a reminder: that what is golden may not shine, and what shines may not last—but meaning endures in the roots we cannot see.
